Hitting The Streets

John Grisham Sticks To Successful Formula In His New Novel, The Street Lawyer, And Gets In Some Licks For The Homeless.

February 4, 1998|By CHAUNCEY MABE Book Editor

THE STREET LAWYER. John Grisham. Doubleday. $27.95. 348 pp.

Following a recent foray into Hollywood screenwriting, John Grisham returns to stupefyingly familiar territory with his new novel, The Street Lawyer, which hits stores today.

Flat characters, fast pace, a story that pits a soiled young lawyer against a big heartless law firm _ there's little new here except for the Dickensian portrayal of the misery of the homeless, which Grisham presents with knowledgable sincerity.

Michael Brock is a 32-year-old lawyer who makes more than $125,000 a year with the powerful Washington law firm of Drake & Sweeney. He has a beautiful wife who will soon be a doctor, and he's on track to make partner _ which means he'll become a millionaire _ by the time he's 35 or 40.

This cozy life is derailed in the opening scenes when a homeless man, DeVon Hardy, straps on dynamite, walks into the firm with a handgun and takes Brock and eight of his fellow lawyers hostage. Police sharpshooters kill the man before he can harm anyone, but unlike his co-workers, Michael cannot return to the grinding routine of big-time lawyering.

Shaken, Brock confronts the reality that the long hours demanded by his job have destroyed his marriage. The work is boring; suddenly the money is meaningless. After drifting for a few days, he goes to the inner city to discover what led the homeless man to assault Drake & Sweeney.

At a soup kitchen, Brock meets Mordecai Green, head of the 14th Street Legal Clinic, an imposing black attorney who has dedicated his life to helping the homeless. Volunteering to work in the kitchens, Brock befriends a young woman, Lontae Burton, and her four children. The next day, the family is dead, victims of a freezing February night on the streets of the nation's capital.

To the amazement of wife, parents and everyone at Drake & Sweeney, Brock decides to join the legal clinic _ salary: $30,000 _ for a new career in public interest law. Brock discovers that the firm illegally evicted the Burtons, along with Hardy and several other people, from an unregulated apartment building to make way for a lucrative project to build a new postal depot.

On his last night at Drake & Sweeney, Brock steals a file detailing the evictions from the office of one of the partners, intending to copy and return it. But a car wreck puts him in the hospital, the theft is discovered, and now Brock is faced with the prospect of losing his license and even going to prison.

How Brock pays for his crime while winning justice for Burton and Washington's homeless population plays out in typical ham-handed Grisham fashion. The prose is undistinguished at best _ on the second and third pages of the book, he uses the words ``important'' or ``very important'' three times without the slightest irony _ while the characters are resolutely one-dimensional, the plotting predictable.

Yet Grisham clearly cares about the plight of the homeless, which he explores with depth and feeling. Here Mordecai Green rails against local governments that make homelessness a crime:

``. . . Take a guy living on the streets, in and out of shelters, working somewhere for minimum wage, trying his best to step up and become self-sufficient. Then he gets arrested for sleeping under a bridge. He doesn't want to be sleeping under a bridge, but everybody's got to sleep somewhere. He's guilty because the city council has made it a crime to be homeless. He has to pay thirty bucks just to get out of jail, and another thirty for his fine. Sixty bucks out of a very shallow pocket. So the guy gets kicked down another notch. He's been arrested, humiliated, fined, punished, and he's supposed to see the error of his ways and go find a home. Get off the damned streets. It's happening in most of our cities.''

Those who enjoy the predigested legal thrillers of John Grisham will doubtless make The Street Lawyer another best seller, but they'll also get more than they bargained for _ a primer in the misery of the homeless and the injustice that keeps them in extreme poverty. So give the book one star for literary merit; four stars for heart.